It’s Like Marketing, But Designed for Humans: Lessons from Oatly’s Executive Vice President
If you’re sipping an oat milk latte while reading this, you’re in luck.
Keep reading to discover the secret sauce (um… milk?) of Oatly’s deadly guerrilla marketing strategy.
Find out why the global creative director fired the entire marketing department, why Oatly is a big fan of publishing its lawsuits online, and Brendan Lewis’s belief that growth marketing needs to be “neutralized, if not completely destroyed.”
Lesson 1: Put creative first.
Brendan LewisOatly’s senior vice president of global communications and public affairs, says it all started when John Schoolcraft, global creative director, was tasked with turning a small Swedish dairy company into a global sensation.
His first step towards world domination? Fire the entire marketing department.
Then he took the creative department and put it at the center of the company. The creative team is involved in everything from sales meetings to supply chain meetings.
Lewis says this allows her team at Oatly to ignore traditional marketing tactics in favor of the present moment, and allows them to be more transparent with people.
A striking (and hilarious) example: when the Spanish dairy lobby sues Oatly Regarding its ad proclaiming, “It’s like milk, but made for humans,” Oatly didn’t get defensive. He has just published the entire trial online.
Or, my favorite: FckOatly.com — Oatly’s website dedicated to collecting all their bad press and negative comments in one place.
It’s like Yelp’s one-star reviews had a baby with Reddit’s worst trolls, organized by Oatly themselves.
Lewis tells me that the FckOatly.com meetings were some of the most hilarious of his career. There are countless permutations of FckOatly.com (like FckFckOatly.com, and so on) and if you follow it all the way through, you’ll find a phone number you can call to register your displeasure.
He didn’t do anything about it legally.
“And now,” he concludes with a mischievous smile, “When our marketing doesn’t hit, it’s just more content for FckOatly.com. So everyone wins, even if we lose.
Lesson 2: Don’t let growth marketing dominate your strategy.
One of Lewis’ favorite speeches is his belief that growth marketing needs to be “neutered, if not totally destroyed.”
“It’s nothing more than a marketing spreadsheet,” he told me. When marketers buy clicks and perfect their emails for click-through rates, Lewis says they’re leaving out one essential ingredient: emotion.
“If you water down your message to optimize it for clicks, you lose your soul,” he tells me without a trace of grandiosity. “The emotion and the conviction have to be there. It can’t just be someone looking at email click-through rates all day.
(Got it – I’m going to stop obsessing over the subject lines of this email…)
For Oatly, that means taking the plunge without testing it to death first. Like in 2023, when the company bought billboards in Times Square to proudly endorse its climate label. (The Oatly team invited the dairy industry to join in. They declined.)
The secret sauce? Oatly is a mission-driven company that sells oat milk; it is not a product-driven, mission-seeking company. Thus, its leaders are able to act on impulse and intuition, provided they know that their messages respond to their broader objective of promoting sustainable development.
Lesson 3: Good marketing is like free falling from space.
When asked which brand he looked to for inspiration, Lewis was quick to answer: Red Bull.
Affectionately known as the “heart attack in a box.”
Lewis’s eyes light up when he talks about it: “They don’t do product marketing. It’s all about the lifestyle and people jumping from space. They get people talking.
They do, just like Oatly. And while we may not find all the budgets (or adrenaline-junkie volunteers, for that matter) to cast humans from the edge of spaceThere’s something to be said for pushing the boundaries of our marketing campaigns to create an emotional connection with people… CTRs be damned.
